


To Make an End

by Mertiya



Series: Ultimate Rebirth [1]
Category: Dangan Ronpa, Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: By which I mean standard Komaeda, Hugs, Hugs are basically the entire purpose of this fic if I'm being honest, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Mental Health Issues, Self-Hatred, spoilers for DR3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 15:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8214169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: He's not ready, but he wakes up anyway.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Strawberry Dynamo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4375058) by [Vhaiada](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vhaiada/pseuds/Vhaiada). 



> Apparently I can't stop writing for this fandom...I wanted a piece of Komaeda's point of view as well, so here we are.

_“For last year's words belong to last year's language_  
_And next year's words await another voice._  
_And to make an end is to make a beginning." -- T.S. Eliot_

 

_ERROR DETECTED IN MEMORY FILE 37ABXX1…_

_ERROR DETECTED IN MEMORY FILE 37ABXX2…_

_ERROR DETECTED IN MEMORY FILE 37ABXX3…_

_…_

_…_

_982 ERRORS DETECTED IN MEMORY FILES_

_OUTPUT SUPPRESSED_

_FULL REVITALIZATION INADVISABLE_

_ATTEMPTING RESTORATION_

            Pink and white, broken and pixelated. Pink and white. Strawberry scent, soft vibrations. The sound of waves and the shifting sense of sand beneath him. A name on the tip of his tongue. He feels warm and safe and happy. Hopeful. There is a hand in his hair, and when he tips his head back, he catches a smile on the face behind him, although it is quickly replaced by a confused scowl. He does not deserve this smile, but it makes the turmoil inside him fall silent, and he cannot help but try to tease it out again.

 

_MEMORY FILE 37ABXX1 RESTORED_

            Green eyes peer into his. A voice asking him if he’s awake. Yes, of course he’s awake. It’s the morning. Why wouldn’t he be? He knows he should be planning something—figuring out the next step in the deadly game so that he can become a stepping stone—but all he wants to do is lie here and bask in green eyes and the warmth of arms holding him.

 

_MEMORY FILE 37ABXX2 RESTORED_

            Pink again, the scent of strawberries everywhere. Everything smells like food, but his stomach is empty. There are hands on his hips, and there’s a tremor that goes through him, carrying bliss through a body that doesn’t deserve it. He sucks on fingers in his mouth and tastes strawberry.

 

_MEMORY FILE 37ABXX3 RESTORED_

            Pain. Bright pink pain, every breath a desperate battle around the foreign wooden object that has transfixed him entirely. No strawberry smell now, only the faint bitter trace of copper. But it will all be worth it, when all of them are gone and can no longer be a threat. If _hope_ is all that is left for him, then he’s going to take it, no matter how bittersweet. If he has fallen, he can be redeemed. They should be so lucky.

 

_MEMORY FILE 37ABXY9 RESTORED_

_DISTURBANCE IN BRAIN WAVES_

_INSTABILITY DETECTED_

_SAFETY OVERRIDE PROTOCOL AT 10%_

            There’s the smell of blood in the air, the sound of screeching, rending metal mixed up with a horrible thud. There’s blood on the road, pink against the white concrete. Blood on his hands, pink against white skin. Blood, pink against white fur.

 

_MEMORY FILE 21UVYN13 RESTORED_

_DISTURBANCE IN BRAIN WAVES_

_HEART RATE ELEVATED FROM NORMAL_

_INSTABILITY DETECTED_

_SAFETY OVERRIDE PROTOCAL AT 33%_

 

            He stares at the computer screen, at the files. At the _truth_. At once, sickening and revelatory. His mind ticks forward, ticks back. Despair. Hope must _always_ conquer despair, or there is nothing for—not just him, but _anyone_. None of them is free. None of them is safe. And there is a dark pocket behind his head that he shoves down again as he wonders if he, too, could become hope.

 

_ATTEMPTING TO RESTORE MEMORY FILE 38KZQY3_

 

            There’s a boat. There’s a boy. There’s a boat.

 

_CORRUPTION IN MEMORY FILE_

_RETRY WITH FOURIER IMPUTATION._

 

            This pain shivers violently up his arm, nerves and tendons screaming with this agony, but there is some darker agony behind even this, some dark region of his mind screaming because he knows _he knows_ he knows _he knows_

_CORRUPTION IN MEMORY dark haired BOY_

_strawberriTY DETECTED_

_BRAIN blood DESTABILIZING_

_FURTHER RESTORATION INADVISABLE_

_SAFETY OVERRIDE PROTOCOL AT 100%_

_SAFETY OVERRIDE IN_

_10_

_9_

_8_

_7_

_6_

_5_

_4_

_pink and white_

_2_

_1_

_BEGIN REVITALIZATION_

_Pink and white_. No. The grainy image of a bloody spear broke apart in front of Komaeda’s eyes and reformed into a—hand? Dark red nails and a bandage coming loose around it. Something about it caught horribly in the back of his mind, and he leaned over the side of the bed and was promptly sick.

            A sleepy noise from somewhere behind him drew his attention in the other direction. “Ah, crap, I fell—wait—you’re _awake_?”

            He turned blankly in the direction of the voice. In the greenish light of what appeared to be a monitor of some kind, it wasn’t difficult to recognize Souda, though he had no conception of what the other boy was doing here. Though maybe it would help if he knew where _here_ was. He felt dazed and dopey, something like the aftermath of nightmares chasing their way through his brain.

            “Souda- _san_?” The words came out rough and confused.

            “Uh…uh…don’t do anything, don’t go anywhere, and don’t try to kill anyone, I’ll be right back!”

            He was out the door and running before Komaeda could do more than open his mouth to respond. Limply, exhaustedly, he lay back against the pillows, trying to gather his thoughts together into something more coherent. Judging from the lighting and the equipment, he was in a hospital room, but not in any hospital room—he could feel something attached around the crown of his head. Frowning, he stared down at his hands, willing the images to crystallize—and this time, they did. Ah.

            Jabberwock Island. Monokuma. A gun with five bullets. And the Remnants of Despair. Komaeda stared down at his white arms. So he had failed then. His luck, always flawed, always suspect, had not done as he had hoped it would, because if it had, he would never have woken up. It was odd, though. Now that he was awake—he still didn’t seem to have any of his memories. He knew what secrets he had uncovered, but he did not seem to remember much more than that, nothing much from beyond the bounds of the simulation itself.

            Well, it was no more than trash like him deserved. He couldn’t even keep despair from the world. None of them could. In the end, you always drew the black lot, not the white one, even if the zebra stripes of luck made it seem like it might go the other way. But no, it was the end now—or past the end, perhaps—and he was still here, still suffering, still…

            “ _Komaeda-kun_!” The door was flung open so hard he heard it bound off the back wall, and he looked up, confused, to see—

            Hope.

            In defiance of everything his head and heart were telling him, something inside him surged up, his stomach fluttering with some kind of desperate plea. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that he should react this way to someone who had helped plunge the world into despair, and, even besides that, it wasn’t right that he, who had failed so utterly, proved once again that he was worth absolutely nothing, should be allowed to have a single positive feeling ever again.

            Hinata took just two steps to cover the entire room, and Komaeda bowed his head, not entirely certain what he was expecting. The next moment, he was almost knocked over backward as a pair of arms encircled him, and he let out a surprised, “ _oomph_ ,” when Hinata squeezed. “I can’t believe it,” Hinata was muttering. “You’re actually _awake_.” Then Komaeda was pulled backwards by a pair of hands on his shoulders, resettled slightly further back. “You scared the fuck out of me,” Hinata said angrily.

            This—was confusing. The two sentences seemed to have little to do with one another, and Komaeda could not parse Hinata’s intent. Finally, he murmured, “I’m sorry, Hinata-kun,” which felt right, even if he ought to be despising and dismissive of Hinata, as one of the Remnants of Despair. As someone who had fallen to Despair and turned his back on Hope.

            “I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up.”

            “Well, I wasn’t supposed to, but I failed at that, so here I am!” Was he trying to comfort Hinata or simply stating a fact? He wasn’t sure. His feelings and his thoughts did not seem to match one another, and he kept slipping back and forth between one feeling and another, discarding each one before he could figure out what it was.

            Hinata went quiet at that, and Komaeda went back to staring down at his hands. He felt as if he’d had two when he woke up, but now he only had one—the left arm ended in twist of bandages around a rounded stump. The Mystery of the Disappearing Hand, he thought. People’s hands didn’t usually just vanish, did they?

            “Souda’s been working on a replacement, in case you did—I mean, everyone else has woken up by now, and I guess we were beginning to think you wouldn’t, but you did.”

            “Oh,” said Komaeda. Then, because more of a response seemed to be expected, “what happened to it?”

            The hands holding him went still and slack, and he looked up into mismatched eyes. Mismatched…that wasn’t right. Hinata’s eyes had been green, but now the left one was a dark red shading to brown. _A boy on a boat a boy on a boat._ Komaeda shivered, but whatever this feeling was, it wasn’t fear. “You don’t remember?” Hinata said slowly. “I guess that’s good, since if you don’t remember it, the brainwashing must be gone, I think, although we’d better make sure and check.”

            “Brain…washing?” Komaeda tilted his head to one side, struck by the image of a woman with two long pink-blonde pigtails merrily taking a scrubbing brush to the cracked-open top of somebody’s head. _Brainwash, v. make (someone) adopt radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible pressure._

            Brainwashing. Brainwashing?

            It was suddenly absurdly simple to make the connections. Hinata and the others had become Despair not because they truly _were_ but because someone else had rewired them into a different shape. That explained nicely the sudden flutter of hope in his heart whenever Hinata was near; how it could coexist with the chilly knowledge he had gained by pointing a nearly-loaded gun at his brain and pulling the trigger. So, when Komaeda had tried to kill all of them—ah—the roulette wheel that he had spun had not been the wheel he’d thought he’d been spinning. No, indeed. In allowing himself to believe for an instant that he was _not_ trash, that he was _not_ worthless—that he could aspire to some meaning, some hope himself—he had nearly become the entirety of Despair.

            It was rather funny, actually. Which explained why he was laughing. If the sounds coming out of his mouth were, in fact, laughter, which he wasn’t entirely sure of. “Komaeda?” The voice was coming from far away. A sudden, sharp pain in both of his hands made him gasp and laugh harder, because he didn’t have both of them.

            _Smack!_ His head snapped to the side, pain flaring up in one cheek. “Komaeda, stop it.” It wasn’t Hinata’s voice; although the pitch was the same, the cadence had smoothed out and changed, turned steadier and more authoritative. Komaeda stared up at the boy in front of him through startled eyes. _The boy on the boat?_

“Izu—Kamukura _-san_ ,” he breathed, knowing that he knew but not knowing how. A definite oddity, to have a piece of knowledge—to know that someone slotted into a very important place in your heart—without knowing how you knew. But he knew _who_ Kamukura was, and he knew how he—a miserable waste of space who had so nearly played the part of actual Despair—should react. He was on his knees in front of him in less than a moment. “A piece of trash like me won’t ask to be forgiven,” he said into the floor. “But when I am killed, can I—can I perhaps ask for you to do it yourself?”

            “What,” said the person above him, in a flat voice that could have been either Hinata or Kamukura.

            “Ah—if even that is too much, I completely understand,” Komaeda mumbled into the floor. “Someone like me definitely doesn’t deserve such a favor.”

            “Komaeda…” That was definitely Hinata again, and Komaeda risked a brief glance upward. “For fuck’s sake. I need—we need your help. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up for weeks.”

            This was puzzling. “But…I’ve proven that I’m unreliable and—and dangerous. I can’t be anything more than a stepping stone now. I suppose if you don’t think that I should be even that, I won’t contest you, but…”

            “Komaeda, _stop it_.” The voice was halfway between now. “You’re being stupid.”

            He sat up on his heels. “I don’t understand.”

            Hinata knelt in front of him. “Yeah, no wonder, if you _just_ woke up. Everybody was a little disoriented at first. Look—you were _wrong_ in the simulation. You had bad information, and you made a bad call, but in the end, we were all still okay. We still have a chance to bring hope to the world, and you’re smart enough and talented enough to help us.”

            Komaeda’s brain was coming up with a lot of objections, but he wasn’t going to contradict Hinata. Hope caught in his stomach and fluttered into his throat, and he managed to nod.

            “Now get back on the bed,” Hinata said, putting an arm beneath Komaeda’s shoulder and heaving him up. Komaeda let himself be lifted and set down gently, and then, suddenly, Hinata’s arms were around him again, Hinata’s breath soft on his throat. Komaeda went utterly still, because at any moment, his luck might turn. But nothing changed other than the rapidity of his own heartbeat in his ears, and the strange sense of—belonging.

            With a shuddering sigh, knowing that he did not deserve it, Komaeda buried his head in Hinata’s shoulder and returned the embrace.

            “Thank you for waking up,” Hinata breathed in his ear, and, for once in his life, Nagito Komaeda’s luck held.


End file.
